Garage Sales, Swapatorium

October 3rd, 2006

Economy Swapatorium is a pretty cool site if you want to see forgotten, old vintage stuff in a new light.

My wife and I are both occasional garage-sale hounds, and in addition to searching for a good deal, there’s the added entertainment element of seeing what other people bought and now want to rid themselves of.

At various garage, yard, and estate sales we’ve bought several rugs, our dining room table, plenty of old movies, a British wall-hanging, some Beatles collectibles, clothes, assorted kitchen crap, magnets, books, and storage boxes. Two of my prized finds are old Apple Computer promotional books, that I got for five bucks out of someone’s storage unit.

A good source for garage sales is Craigslist. We’ve also had good luck just driving around certain neighborhoods on Saturday morning, looking for the obligatory cardboard signs hanging on poles.

I find the best garage sales are ones where people are looking to get rid of stuff fast and cheap, typically estate sales or moves (out of town, into a new place).

Good shopping strategies are to hit a sale either early in the day (the best stuff hasn’t been snatched up) or at the end of a sale (when the sellers are tired and start discounting things in order to avoid packing it up).

The worst garage sales are ones where the sellers are trying to make money. Meaning, they are trying to sell things close to or for what they originally paid for it. I think these types of sales are better held on eBay, as the garage sale mentality still centers around the good bargain. When confronted with an overpriced garage sale, we just walk away.
Other observations:

Do a drive-by to quickly scan what’s out on the lawn. Avoid sales where there are piles of worn, wrinkled clothing arranged in piles on tarps.

People seem to have a hard time throwing away anything to do with food: silverware, peelers, juicers, graters… anything sold on TV after 1 AM.

Kid-stuff (cribs, shoes, toys) all go for cheap. Children grow up fast and outgrow a lot of their clothing, and I think there are just too many toys given to kids and so there is a surplus that makes its way to the garage sale.

Sometimes blocks or whole neighborhoods will have simultaneous garage sales, with the local neighborhood paper providing a map to all the locations.

Fun garage sales are where the holders were involved in some business (usually retail, and probably failed) and are selling their stock for cheap. We’ve encountered hiking supplies, knock-off watches, and aquarium supplies.

Lastly, there’s a slightly more noble reason to do the garage sale thing. The amount of material crap in the modern middle-class life is staggering. Usually, this gluttony is hidden away behind closed doors, but during the garage sale, a portion of it is splayed out on a lawn as if from a gutted beast.

So by purchasing a used item, that’s one less object bought at retail and one less item tossed in the garbage bin. Garage saleing can be seen as a practical form of recycling: and it’s fun, too.

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